


A Terran for Vuurmptak

by penumbralsock



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dehumanization, F/M, Rape as discipline, Restraints
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-30 22:18:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19412539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penumbralsock/pseuds/penumbralsock
Summary: Old Bazaaph's most celebrated trainer of semi-sapient alien species is called into work on her day off.





	A Terran for Vuurmptak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Darkerchild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkerchild/gifts).



It was Vuurmptak, the Day of Beneficent Conquest, and Thorpe stalked the glittering streets of Ceylurg, richest and most fashionable of Old Baazaph’s seven districts, in a towering temper. An urgent summons from the agency on an intergalactic holiday generally meant the kind of crisis only Thorpe – employee of the year two hundred and seventy-three years running, certified expert in the care and management of 10,657 of the Benevolent Empire’s 10,658 semi-sapient domestic species – could be counted on to handle.

Then they’d told her the address. There wasn’t a sarlaac or titanic skrill within a hundred klerg of the Refulgent Avenue. “VIP customer,” her agent had wheezed, attempting to prise Thorpe’s proboscis from where it was wrapped around his throat. “Tremendous opportunity! A real coup for the agency just to be consulted.”

“And you couldn’t find anyone else for this singular honor?” She gave an emphatic squeeze. “Such as, for example, someone who isn’t staggeringly over-qualified?” It was a pity, actually. Thorpe was in molt. Coaxing some Senator’s ornamental plimpy down from a tree was a task for an intern, but a fang of gnashers on a rampage would have fit her mood like a glove.

Of course he couldn’t have called anyone else, Thorpe was assured. The problem animal was an exotic species, imported from a planet assimilated mere months ago. No one in Bazaaph had so much as seen one before. Very important customer. Only the agency’s most celebrated handler would do.

That had mollified Thorpe until she’d actually pulled up the scant research available on the animal in question. The plimpy would have been more exciting. Clawless, wingless, soft-skinned and nearly hairless, Terrans were contenders for the least imposing species in the nine galaxies. It was a minor miracle they had survived long enough for the Benevolent Empire to get around to assimilating their backwater planet in the first place.

And so it was with the barest vestige of her usual aplomb that Thorpe found herself nodding to the doorman of a mansion opulent even by Ceylurgine standards. Before either of them got a word out, the door was flung open with wood-splintering force, and the unfortunate man was shouldered out of the way by an elaborately gowned woman of middle years, all iridescent scales and fluttering feathered appendages.

“Oh, thank the Merciful Tyrant you’re here,” the woman said with a musical trill. “It’s been ghastly. You must come straightaway. The beast is utterly beyond control.” She spun on her heel and dashed back inside, beckoning vigorously for Thorpe to follow.

Of course it would have to be Sleazles. She couldn’t abide Sleazles. Bourgeois twits, the entire species. Thorpe sighed, expelling her irritation in a haze of smoke. A passing insect fluttered to the ground. She summoned all her professional forbearance and gave chase.

Their sprint terminated in a bright, high-ceilinged room behind the peristyle. In its center stood a strikingly beautiful girl – no, a young woman, Thorpe amended. She wore her gown wrapped in the fashion of adolescence and painted her scales to a gaudy mother-of-pearl sheen, but the fullness of her white plumage belied her otherwise juvenile appearance.

Right at that moment, she was intent on keeping her grip on the struggling Terran. She held it dangling in midair by the joint of one appendage – its ankle; Thorpe prided herself on her knowledge of alien anatomy – and with her other arm she jabbed at the terrified thing with what appeared to be a long, green cucurbit. The Terran, in turn, was flailing its free limbs and making a great deal of noise.

“You have to eat,” the Sleazle girl, oblivious to their arrival, was telling her wriggling captive. She poked it again with the cucurbit. “You’ll starve if you don’t eat.” At her feet sat a basket of assorted fruit.

“My youngest daughter, Dulcinea,” the elder Sleazle said to Thorpe. “Her father bought her the wretched creature for Vuurmptak. Exotics are the fashion, and of course one does what is fashionable, but there is such a thing as too far! I’d found a zookeeper with a cloud-crested quisling, but no, Threnody has a quisling. So off her father goes to the market and the next thing I – oh, _tell_ me it isn’t dangerous!”

The woman’s last plea achieved such a pitch that it broke through her daughter’s preoccupation with the Terran and called her attention to the presence of these latest additions to the room. This distraction proved unfortunate, however, as the Terran’s flailing heel caught her full in the face.

Dulcinea yelped and dropped the Terran as her mother trilled a battle cry and charged to her offspring’s defense. The girl made to give chase but was hampered by the older woman, who strove simultaneously to interpose her own body between her daughter and the fleeing Terran and to pelt the creature with fruit from the now-overturned basket. The Terran, meanwhile, ran straight into Thorpe, fell over, righted itself, and reversed course, now making for the door at the far end of the room at top speed.

“Enough!” Thorpe bellowed in a voice that brought small flakes of plaster raining down from the ceiling. The two Sleazles froze in astonishment. The Terran, on the other hand, only accelerated its mad scramble for the door. Thorpe whipped her proboscis around the creature’s midriff and hoisted it kicking into the air.

Thorpe cleared her throat. “I am Harmodia Thorpe, of the Guild for the Husbandry and Control of Semi-Sapient Animals. Allow me to assist you in taming your new Terran.”

“Thank you, Madam Thorpe,” said Dulcinea, “but Hopper is entirely tame! She would never hurt me on purpose.” 

The girl’s mother made a chuffing noise, the most unmusical sound Thorpe had yet heard from a Sleazle. “Darling, the creature just attacked you. It is a menace! Won’t you reconsider the quisling? I’m sure Hopper would be very happy in a zoo,” the matronly Sleazle said. “Or perhaps an abattoir,” she muttered in a voice too low for her daughter to catch. “Well, Madam Thorpe, I will leave you to your work.”

“I’m sure Hopper is a very sweet creature and that you two will be the best of friends once she’s properly trained,” Thorpe assured the young Sleazle, adopting the girl’s choice of pronoun. “But a skittish animal can be dangerous without being naturally disposed toward aggression.” Personally, Thorpe thought she’d seen glitterbugs that looked more dangerous than the Terran, but the girl’s evident lack of common sense suggested a conservative approach. Even a cuddle-phlarg would nip you if you stepped on its tentacles.

“I was just trying to feed her,” Dulcinea said.

“Very admirable.” Judging by the Terran’s size and the heat coming off of it, it probably would need to be fed daily, if not multiple times a day. “However, a Terran’s mouth is located at the anterior end of the animal.” Dulcinea looked blank. “Up here,” Thorpe told her, gripping the head of the Terran, which seemed either to have given up on escape or else to have tired itself out. Its teeth didn’t look they’d be up to much. Soft foods were indicated. “Not here.” She tapped the animal’s haunches, prompting renewed wriggling.

As Dulcinea opened her mouth in a silent O, Thorpe retrieved a coin-sized apparatus from her belt pouch and flipped it spinning into the air. It expanded, unfolding as it revolved, until it settled to the floor as an examination trestle, padded cuffs at each corner.

“Let’s have a look at you,” she said to the Terran, and set it face-up on the trestle. It made distress noises and struggled a bit as she attempted to restrain it, but she held its hips and abdomen pinned to the table with her proboscis while she caught and secured each of is appendages with her own hands.

The Terran wore a blue ribbon collar with a silver bell. A brief blue cloth wrapped around its waist, like a very short skirt. It was otherwise unclothed. It was pale – likely the reason Dulcinea had assumed it was female – and sleeker than the specimens Thorpe had seen pictured in her research. It had less body fat than the Terrans diagrammed in the zoological journals, and its thin epidermis rendered the outline of its musculature partially visible. Those muscles created an odd kind of ripple up and down the Terran’s body as it fought against the restraints. The effect was strange, but not unpleasing.

“Why Hopper?” she asked absently, examining the animal for signs of injury or sickness.

“It’s something from her papers,” Dulcinea said. “They’re full of vids of her jumping high into the air with a big stick. Then there’s another stick, and whenever she jumps over it she hops up and down and all the Terrans around her cheer. My dad says the merchant thought it might have had something to do with Terran religion.”

It sounded more like a primitive form of play to Thorpe, or perhaps a mating display. She was nevertheless intrigued by the implications: for one thing, it implied Terrans were herd animals. The Munificent Army always surveilled every inch of a newly-discovered planet through the panopticon before bringing it the Gift of Assimilation, so the final weeks of Hopper’s life on Terra would have been fully recorded. Thorpe made a note to review that footage later.

“There were a lot of Terrans watching Hopper jump. Do you think she was very important in their society?” Dulcinea asked.

“Hopper is a he,” Thorpe corrected Dulcinea. “The differences are subtle, but Terrans are sexually dimorphic. Look here.” She lifted the blue cloth covering his genitals and provoked a curious reaction. Hopper once again began making a lot of noise, but this time his skin also changed color like a mimeoform’s, abruptly reddening across his face, neck, and upper torso. Thorpe wondered if the red was a defense mechanism; some animals used displays of color as a means of frightening off potential predators. 

“He makes those noises a lot,” Dulcinea told her. “Do you think he’s trying to talk to us? Should I call for a universal interpreter?”

“Terrans are classified as a semi-sapient species,” Thorpe answered. “Semi-sapients do sometimes develop rudimentary systems of communication, if not what you or I would call language. But their vocalizations aren’t included in translation databases, even when we understand some of them.” In truth, Thorpe suspected some marginal species were classified as semi-sapient more because the paperwork involved in conquering a sapient civilization was horrific than in response to any truly scientific criteria, but Terrans seemed unlikely to be one of those borderline cases. By all accounts, their species had been well on its way to the irreversible destruction of its own biosphere when the Magnanimous Fleet had arrived to bring them the Gift. 

“In any case, these are his genitalia. Here underneath are the male Terran gonads, and in front we have the phallus.”

Dulcinea looked skeptical. “Are you sure? I thought it might be a vestigial appendage. It hardly seems …” she pursed her lips, clearly reluctant to impugn the newly-identified manhood of her latest accessory.

“It’ll be a bit less diminutive when he’s in rut.” Thorpe bent over the Terran and exhaled a tiny cloud of red smoke. He coughed, blinked, and began to squirm again with increased agitation. His phallus also slowly engorged. Thorpe noted that the red was back, and deeper now. His face and neck were nearly the color of his hair.

“Oh, how novel,” Dulcinea enthused. “Threnody’s quisling doesn’t do anything half so curious.” 

The aphrodisiac was having a stronger effect on the Terran than Thorpe had anticipated. He was still twisting over the trestle, pulling against the restraints, but now Thorpe judged that his objective was not so much escape as the sensation of friction against his bare skin. They both watched for a moment, slightly taken aback. His red face was averted, twisted as far off to the side as it would go. His eyes were squeezed shut.

Thorpe had not become Old Bazaaph’s premiere trainer of semi-sapient species by ignoring an opportunity for instruction when one presented itself. “Now is as good a time as any,” she told Dulcinea, “to begin Hopper’s training.” She withdrew a device from her belt and considered it. It had been designed for use on Thracerians, a bipedal species of semi-sapients from the recently liberated planet Xaniz III, and it was ruthlessly effective in curbing fractious behavior. Terran anatomy was not dissimilar to Thracerian – not from the waist down, anyway – and Thorpe thought it might work in a pinch. Improvisation was key with any unfamiliar species.

“What are you going to do with that?” Dulcinea asked.

“I? Nothing, my dear. Hopper is yours, and you must learn how to bring him to heel. I will talk you through the process.” She gave the girl the device, which took the form of a slightly curved rod with flexible, articulated tendrils at each end. 

“Now then,” she said, “the most common cause of misbehavior among semi-sapient species is an excess of nervous energy. Proper exercise is of course essential for docility. Perhaps we can find Hopper another jumping stick, or even a mate,” the girl's mother would love that, “but the first lesson he needs to learn is what happens when that nervous energy is expressed aggressively, as it was today, and must therefore be answered with discipline. Why don’t you begin by removing his loincloth.”

Hopper gave a sharp little intake of breath as Dulcinea’s hands brushed against his lower abdomen. The girl unfastened a silver clasp at the Terran’s waist and the wrapped blue cloth came undone.

“Good. Now, gently insert the device. No, not there. Lower. Yes.”

Dulcinea spread the Terran’s trembling thighs and carefully worked the device into him. Almost immediately, his back arched and he cried out, spasming.

Dulcinea jumped back hastily, fluttering several inches above the floor. “Was that –” 

“Semen, my dear. Pay it no mind. Terrans have been catalogued by the Zoological Academy, and none of their secretions are toxic to any known species.” 

She showed Dulcinea how to trigger the device at its lowest setting. It woke with a gentle, humming vibration. The Terran didn’t react much, but his phallus was semi-tumescent again. 

At the second setting, the magnitude of the vibration increased and its frequency varied, starting gently but slowly building to a furious pace before tapering off again. The Terran began to moan, twisting its body to one side and then the other. Another increment, and the Terran’s vocalizations increased in pitch. Thorpe explained to Dulcinea that the tendrils at the far end of the device were now at work, hidden inside the Terran’s body.

“Shouldn’t we stop now?” asked Dulcinea, peering at Hopper with some concern. “That sounds like a distress call, doesn’t it?”

“It is,” Thorpe confirmed, “but that is all to the good. Semi-sapients respond to operant conditioning. Hopper will understand that he was punished today and remember it. I promise we will not injure him.”

The tendrils at the anterior end of the device now activated, wrapping around Hopper’s external genitalia to deliver both electric and mechanical stimulation. The Terran had ejaculated twice more, and the noises he was now making were truly irritating. Thorpe made a note to find Hopper a muzzle.

Dulcinea, meanwhile, was hovering over the Terran, now running a hand through his hair, now cooing softly at the distressed animal. Thorpe would not have thought Hopper would have found the touch particularly comforting, but he appeared to lean into the contact. Interesting.

With a final whir, the device came to a halt. The Terran went limp in his restraints, slumping back against the trestle. Dulcinea continued her fluttering caresses, babbling nonsense to her pet and telling him what a good boy he was going to be from now on. Thorpe caught Hopper’s eye and almost imagined she saw a glimmer of wary intelligence there, as if the animal were assessing her mood in contrast to Dulcinea’s. 

Pure fancy, of course. Yet one thing was certain: there was real fear in that gaze. Hopper might not have the capacity for reason, but he understood that Thorpe’s arrival had altered his situation, that misbehavior would have consequences.

It was an understanding to build on.


End file.
